


Alterations

by ami_ven



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: writerverse, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e20 The Last Man, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-04-07
Packaged: 2018-05-31 18:38:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6482509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ami_ven/pseuds/ami_ven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the alternate timeline, Rodney manages to find some happiness as he makes a plan to save John.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alterations

**Author's Note:**

> written for LJ community "writerverse" in 2012

  
_“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”_   
—Anne Lamotte 

After everything that happened, no one was really all that surprised when Rodney left the SGC to take the job at a community college. They _were_ surprised that he managed not to get himself killed by his students before the end of the first month, but anyone who actually knew Rodney knew why he’d done it.

Or, at least, they thought they did. Because Rodney himself hadn’t understood exactly why he was so determined to change the timeline until the first week of his eighth semester of teaching, when his room full of physics students had sounded so much like a lab of Atlantis scientists that he’d turned toward the classroom doorway with his mouth open to say, “See what I have to deal with, Sheppard?”

But John wasn’t there. John was lost in a wormhole that would send him forty-some thousand years into Atlantis’s future, and Rodney suddenly _missed_ him so much it was a physical ache. He ended class early and headed straight for his apartment, where he collapsed on the couch and stared at his collection of equation-covered whiteboards.

Even if this worked, and he found a way to send John back from the future, he, the Rodney from this timeline, would never see John again. Somehow, he’d never thought of that before, and is chest ached again.

And it was apparently the day for such revelations, because he realized a moment later that he didn’t miss Jennifer. Oh, he was still sad about her death, but mostly because she was too nice to have had something so horrible happen to her, because she’d had a family that loved her. Rodney had loved her, too, but he realized now that he hadn’t been in love with her. He didn’t think about her that often, anymore, and found he couldn’t even remember what color her eyes were.

He still remembered everything about John, right down to his stupid hair— all this time, he’d been in love with John Sheppard.

Rodney shot to his feet, ignoring the way his knees popped loudly, and began scribbling furious equations.

Manipulating time was a tremendous undertaking, and doing it so that he could send a person back several thousand years to exactly the right point in a past that would suddenly be changed was nearly impossible, but Rodney wasn’t about to let that stop him.

At first, Jeannie tried to talk him out of it, and when she couldn’t, she began to help. And while the math certainly went faster with someone to check his work, his sister’s real contribution was bringing Madison along when she came to see him. A project like this could easily have become an obsession, but in exchange for Jeannie’s math skills, he had to supply Madison with grilled cheese sandwiches and stories about Atlantis, and she was what kept him from going crazy.

He made the stories sound made-up, when she was still little. But he kept the important parts true, the _people_ , Elizabeth, Carson, Teyla, Ronon, Sam… and John. John featured in a lot of his stories, and Rodney found that talking about him made the ache of losing him hurt a little less.

Eventually, the Stargate Program was declassified, and he could tell Madison some of the scarier stories about fighting the Wraith, and the truer ones, about the Athosians and their other allies. And as she got older, Madison started to help. She chose a college nearby and could always be counted on to suddenly ‘need’ something only her Uncle Mer could bring her at the dorms. She was just trying to get him out of his apartment, but somehow, he didn’t mind.

Madison met a boy at college, an _accountant_ who was nowhere near good enough for her, but he made her happy, and that was all that mattered. Rodney got the third dance at her wedding, right after the groom and her father.

But she didn’t give up helping Rodney with his work. She and her husband lived nearby, halfway between him and her mother, and she came over regularly. Madison brought containers of meals he could heat up later, and went over his equations with him.

A few years later, she brought her daughter, Annie, and Rodney had a new audience for his Atlantis stories. Annie loved them just as much as her mother had, and usually begged to hear one the moment she came in the door.

When the answer finally came, it was Jeannie who found it, in a proof Madison had written using the math Rodney had invented. Rodney was in the kitchen, making grilled cheese and helping Annie with her calculus homework.

“Mer!” she breathed. “Mer, this is it!”

“What?” Annie grabbed the skillet as he raced into the other room. He looked over every number of the proof, then looked it over again. The whiteboard marker clattered to the floor as Rodney collapsed into his armchair. 

“This is it,” he breathed. “I can fix it. I can fix everything.”

“But how?” asked Madison. “You said the solar flare had sent Uncle John _forty-eight thousand_ years into the future.”

His expression fell. “I…” He snapped his fingers. “Madison! That hologram technology you’ve been working on!”

She frowned. “The one based on the hologram room in Atlantis, that uses Ancient— Uncle Mer, you’re a genius.”

Rodney grinned. “Yes, I know.” He shot to his feet, pacing across his tiny living room. “The hologram is just the beginning. Our program will be able to predict a solar flare, yes, but the right kind of solar flare might take years. We have to keep John alive until then… of course, we have to _get_ to Atlantis first…”

Jeannie put her hand on his shoulder. “We’ve come this far, Mer. You can do this.”

“You think?” he asked.

Annie came in from the kitchen, carrying a gooey grilled cheese sandwich, which she pushed into his hand. “Eat something, Uncle Mer. We’ve got work to do.”

“We?” Rodney repeated.

All three women leveled him with a look and he raised his hands in surrender. “Okay. We.” They beamed at him and Rodney smiled back for a moment, then scowled. “So what are you standing around for? Let’s go!”

When he was Annie’s age, Rodney would never have believed that his plan only succeeded because of his friends. Madison— without consulting him, of course— enlisted Radek to help make sure the hologram would still work forty-eight thousand years later. And it was Lorne, _General_ Lorne, commanding officer of the SGC, who authorized a civilian study of Atlantis’s Ancient technology.

“I’m going with you, Uncle Mer,” Madison said, when they had gotten the green light, and he was smart enough not to argue. It would be easier to set up the hologram with another person, and Madison was the foremost expert on Ancient technology— after Rodney himself, of course.

They stepped through the wormhole into Atlantis’s ‘gate room, and she grabbed his arm.

“It’s beautiful, Uncle Mer! It’s the perfect place for your fairy tale!”

“My what?”

Madison grinned. “When I was little, I really didn’t understand what you and Mom were working on. But the stories you told always sounded like fairy tales, and this one did, too— Uncle John being stuck in the future was like he was under an evil spell, and you were the brave prince who was going to rescue him.”

Rodney snorted. “He would be the princess in this story.”

She walked around the Gate Room, looking every inch like the little girl she once was. When she reached him again, she lowered her voice, “Uncle Mer, when… when the timeline resets, if I still grow up to be an astrophysicist, can I come to Atlantis with you and Uncle John?”

He hugged her, ignoring the Marines in the Control Room. “Absolutely,” he said. “Now, let’s get to work.”

With Madison there to help, it seemed almost easy to get the hologram initiated, to set up the solar flare program, to prepare the stasis chambers. When they were finished, Rodney stood at the window, looking out across the city.

This was it. This was what he had spent more than half his life working toward… and he’d done it. Forty-eight thousand years from now, his hologram would activate to greet John when he finally arrived, and send him back to change the past. In the corrected timeline, even Rodney himself wouldn’t know what he’d done to save John.

And, strangely, he was all right with that. 

“Come on, Uncle Mer,” said Madison, softly, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You promised my daughter a dance at her wedding.”

“I did,” Rodney agreed. “Let’s go home.”

THE END


End file.
